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Wealthy teens were more anxious
The poverty study
Suniya Luthar, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, had studied teenagers in poverty in the inner city and found relatively high rates of anxiety, depression, alcohol use, and drug abuse. She attributed it to poverty. One of her graduate students asked how she could know that without a control group of kids from wealthy families.
So she ran the same study in Westchester County. Those teenagers had higher levels of anxiety, depression, binge drinking, and illegal drug use than the kids in poverty. She first called it a problem of affluence, but the more research she did, the clearer it became that the cause was pressure from the school and from parents pushing kids to do well and achieve in other ways.
High-achievement schools
She identified a category of high-achievement schools: private prep schools and public schools in wealthy neighborhoods that pride themselves on how many graduates reach elite colleges and how high their test scores run. Students there from families without wealth suffered as much as the wealthy ones. The kids who stayed protected had parents who truly did not care how they did in school, who enjoyed them for who they were, and who would have been fine if they skipped college.
She and her colleagues followed some of these students into college. They kept suffering at much higher rates than other college students who had arrived with less pressure.
Why would top schools raise student stress?
Psychologist Jennifer Crocker of Ohio State University has studied what she calls contingencies of self-worth, the areas of life a person's sense of value depends on. Schools that publicize test scores and college admissions make academic performance the visible measure of a student. In Crocker's research on college students, those who based their self-worth on academic performance reported more stress around grades than students who did not.
How has perfectionism changed among college students?
In 2019, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill published a meta-analysis of perfectionism scores among college students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It pooled data collected between 1989 and 2016. Self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism all rose over that period, and the socially prescribed form, the feeling that others demand perfection, rose most steeply.
Why did researchers overlook wealthy teenagers?
Research on adolescent risk has long centered on poverty, partly because poverty is tied to public programs and funding. Affluent young people were assumed to be shielded by their resources. In 2002, Suniya Luthar and Bridget Becker published a paper in the journal Child Development titled "Privileged but pressured?" that examined affluent youth as a group in their own right.
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